Darkest Hour came out in 2017, with Gary Oldman under layers of prosthetic makeup as Winston Churchill in the last weeks of May 1940. Joe Wright directed, and Oldman won the Academy …

A small public service before we start: this is Manet, with an ‘a’, Édouard Manet, and not Claude Monet, with an ‘o’. The two are forever muddled, and I will come back …

Regent’s Park in London covers 410 acres of what was once a royal hunting ground. Henry VIII took the land at the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and kept it …

The National Gallery in London turned two hundred in 2025, and to mark it the whole collection was rehung and a few new works came in. One of them is this pastel …

I love The King’s Speech. I have gone back to it more than once, for the plot, for the cast, and above all for Colin Firth as George VI, the performance that …

Before I had ever been anywhere, I knew Venice from paintings. Gold light on green water, gondolas tipped like commas across a canal, a city that looked too lovely to be a …